Capturebot 2 Updates

In March I released a new app, Capturebot 2, and over the last few months I've been fixing bugs and adding a bevy of new features. Today I'm releasing the second update of the year which includes a brand new preset system and several helpful onboarding features.

User Presets & Session Defaults

Capturebot shipped with a handful of built-in presets for capture & output patterns, which were great as building blocks, but didn't fit every workflow. All of that changes with the addition of User Presets which allow you to save as many capture & output patterns as you'd like for easy reuse.

Presets can be created and applied directly from the Session Settings by right-clicking on the pattern name, where you'll find your own presets and the system presets. Perfect for saving your work after you've got the settings for your session just right. Additionally they can be managed from Preferences in the new Presets tab. There you can add, remove, edit, and rename your capture & output presets.

With the addition of presets you can also customize the default document settings from Preferences. You can choose the test folder name, capture pattern, output pattern, and whether to index metadata automatically. New documents will automatically use these options to save some setup time at the beginning of the shoot.

UI Improvements

The interface has also received a handful of small, but useful updates to help you keep track of everything. The most important is the addition of file & shot counts. Available from the View menu enabling "File Count Badges" will show the number of files for each shot, giving you a quick overview of what's been shot and what hasn't. Additionally the number of shots in the shotlist has been added to the inspector.

In an effort to make Capturebot easier to get started with there are several refinements that will be helpful for new users. There are now toolbar items for indexing your capture and output folders and the + button in the sidebar now presents a menu with options to add a new shot or import a shotlist. New filter options are also available in the accessory bar.

Guided Import has also been improved to make it faster and easier to use. After importing your shotlist Capturebot will automatically index the capture folder, showing the files in your session immediately without any additional steps.

Miscellaneous Additions and Fixes

A major under-the-hood change is improved support for external drives, specifically backups to external drives. When opening a document from a backup the capture and output folders correctly point to the external drive, rather than the original folders.

Several buttons and menu items are no longer disabled when they shouldn't be and sidebar buttons have larger hit areas, making them easier to click.

The panel for choosing capture & output folders now defaults to the folder the document is in making session setup even easier. Dragging folders to the capture & output file pickers works correctly and a bug where they wouldn't be saved has been fixed.

Wrapping Up

I'm really happy with the last couple updates to Capturebot, the new features will make the app easier to understand for new users and will help more advanced users work even faster. Capturebot has proven to be invaluable for me on set and I hope it can prove to be just as useful for your own shoots.

Capturebot is available for download¹ and purchase from the project page. More details about all of the features can be found on the Knowledge Base.